01. War In02. Arrival. The Meuse-Argonne03. A7v Mephisto04. High Wood. 75 Acres Of Hell05. Beat The Bastards [The Exploited cover]06. Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire07. Passchenhell08. C'est Mon Dernier Pigeon09. Stoßtrupp10. The Hundred Days Offensive11. War Out

If releasing an album about The Great War on the exact anniversary of the hour it ended doesn't speak of dedication, I don't know what does.

I'm usually not such a big fan of bands with numbers for names, like 1349 and whatnot, but due to this band's extreme dedication to The Great War (that's World War I for you history plebeians) it feels kind of deserved. I mean, just look at the fucking lineup and the aliases they've taken. Like "2.Division, Infanterie-Regiment Nr.147, Oberleutnant - Ditmar Kumarberg". Yeah, that deep. And sure, this amount of dedication bordering obsession can be a little bit gimmicky, but 1914 are the ones deserving of doing it.

While this is not their first album - they've had a full-length and an EP released previously - it's quite clear that The Blind Leading The Blind has been meticulously crafted to be the band's big breakthrough; from the refinement of the sound to the significance of the release date, this album is special. 1914 are at the intersection of a lot of genres, like doom and black and death and post-, and this doesn't make the sound lose identity or sound gimmicky; rather it gives the band more ammo to be versatile in conveying the mood it wants to convey, which more often than not is brutal despair. Not really the slow, funeral doom type, but more of the adrenaline-fueled "there's an artillery shell that could hit you at any moment" type. I mean, it's the kind of motivating feeling that you get when you know that all hope is lost. And that somehow makes something like a cover of The Exploited's "Beat The Bastards" work in such a context.

The melding of the genres does make the music a bit hard to pinpoint, as it's not really a death metal album, it's not really a doom album, it's shifting between slower paces and faster paces somewhat often and it kinda seems like it prefers the latter, but when it does go slow, it's crushing. When it goes fast it's also crushing, but the Bolt Thrower-ish riffs that stampede the listener into the trenches also make the slower moments have more weight than if the album were monotonously paced. And also The Blind makes great use of samples and ambiance; look no further than the All Quiet On The Western Front sample on "The Hundred Days Offensive" to see how much the mood is set by these.

Sure, I'd love to feel a bit of funeral doom-ish despair in here too, but that despair is more longing and romantic, not the one where you could die at any moment. With such a strong reference point in history, 1914 managed to create a behemoth of a riff-machine that found a unique way to be brutal.